“Is it supposed to burn?”
“Uh,” Keith says, consulting the box in his hand. “It doesn’t really say.”
“Because it does,” Shiro says, his nose wrinkling as he sits stock still with a sheet draped over his shoulders and smelly gel piled in his hair.
“You want me to rinse it out?” Keith asks, worrying his bottom lip at Shiro’s discomfort.
“How long does it stay on?” Shiro asks, a little plaintively.
“Twenty minutes,” Keith says, momentarily consulting the long page of instructions that came with the box.
“I think I can handle it for that long,” Shiro says with a resigned sigh, “just come over here and distract me.”
“Let me look at you,” Shiro says.
Keith impatiently presses his lips together. “It’s fine Shiro.”
“Let me see,” Shiro insists.
Keith sighs and grabs the other chair from the set his dad made so long ago. He drags it across the faded throw rug covering the scuffed wood floor and sits down in front of Shiro.
Shiro’s steel gray eyes study his face. He lifts his hand, the only one he has left, and gently tilts Keith’s head to get a better look at the scabbed over wound marring his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” Shiro says finally, dropping his hand.
“Technically, you weren’t even there,” Keith reminds him.
“I may not have been driving at the time,” Shiro says in that dark wry way of his, “but I still feel responsible.”
“It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” Keith says, and it doesn’t, well not much anyway. It stung like a son-of-a-bitch at first, the heat from Shiro’s… Clone Shiro’s plasma blade had been so intense it had burned a welt across Keith’s cheek without even touching his flesh. It continued to burn for several days after, though Krolia kept slathering it with some sort of Galra ointment. It was weird having someone besides Shiro fussing over him, nice, but weird.
“I just hate that you were hurt,” Shiro says, eyeing the yellowing bruises still covering Keith’s face.
“What about me,” Shiro says flatly.
Of course he’ll never admit it, but Keith knows Shiro’s been struggling with living inside a body that isn’t the one he was born wearing. After he’d recovered from the initial shock of… resurrection, he’d been completely freaked out at the way the tech from his artificial arm had expanded to cover his shoulder. It was how Haggar had controlled the clone, and Shiro wanted nothing to do with it. He’d made Hunk strip him of every component, giving up most of what little flesh and blood his arm had left in the process.
“I should’ve saved one of the other ones,” Keith says softly. “They hadn’t been… They were perfect.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Shiro says.
“Like the color of your hair doesn’t matter?” Keith asks. “Because it really doesn’t you know.” Keith tried tinting Shiro’s eyebrows as well, but he doesn’t know how well the coarser hair will take the dye.
“I just wanted to feel normal again,” Shiro murmurs.
“We should wash it out,” Keith says, springing from his seat and taking Shiro’s hand.
He rinses the dye out over the bathroom sink and washes Shiro’s hair with the little foil pack of shampoo that came with the box. Then he helps him towel it dry, because it turns out to be a pain in the ass to do one-handed. Shiro stands and regards himself in the mirror over the sink while Keith silently watches over his shoulder.
“What do you think?” Shiro asks, his eyes shifting to Keith’s reflection in the mirror.
Keith smiles. “It’s like looking back in time,” he says softly.
“Looking at you is like flashing forward in time,” Shiro says wanly. “I hate that I missed your twenty-first birthday.”
“It was a good birthday,” Keith assures him. He hadn’t spent it alone, like so many before. He received the gift of a mother and a space-wolf and two years to get to know them. Probably his best birthday ever now that he’s thinking about it, or it would’ve been if not for one thing. “Even though I missed you,” he adds.
Shiro smiles. “Oh, that reminds me,” he says, leaving the room. Keith watches him go, comfortably relaxed in jeans and a plain white tee, the right sleeve empty and flopping from his missing arm. The Olkari offered him a new one, more advanced than any tech the Galra had. Lighter and stronger too. Shiro had passed. He wanted to feel like less of a stranger in his new skin before he thought about fusing it with machine parts again.
Keith follows after him and finds him in the main room fussing with a white garment box. “Sorry I didn’t wrap it,” he says, handing the box to Keith.
“Consider it a belated birthday present,” Shiro says.
Keith shakes his head. “You didn’t have to–”
“I wanted to,” Shiro tuts firmly. “Well, aren’t you gonna open it?”
Keith eyes Shiro suspiciously and opens the box to find a leather flight jacket inside.
“Is this?” he asks, holding it up and admiring the way the soft caramel colored leather shines in the sunlight.
“Yep,” Shiro says. It’s the flight jacket he was wearing the day Keith met him. The day he came to Keith’s school looking for new recruits and wound up teaching him how to pilot a hoverbike instead. “It doesn’t fit me anymore, and I know you’ve grown out of yours, so I thought maybe you could use it.”
“Shiro, I can’t take this,” Keith says anxiously. “It’s yours.”
“And I want you to have it,” Shiro says. “Go ahead, try it on.”
Keith hesitates. Shiro breathes an exasperated sigh and plucks the jacket from Keith’s slack hands. He drapes it over Keith’s shoulders and pulls a face. “A little help,” he says flatly.
Keith scowls at him and slowly puts his arms through the sleeves. Surprisingly, the jacket fits. It fits really well actually.
“Perfect,” Shiro says, smiling as he smooths down the collar and unexpectedly caresses Keith’s face. Keith throws his arms around Shiro’s neck and presses his head to his chest in a fierce embrace.
“What if I hulk out again?” he says anxiously. When he’s the paladin of the black lion he means. What if he shows his galra stripes in front of the others and they despise him for it. Keith knows Shiro understands. There’s always been an unspoken shorthand between them.
“Keith,” Shiro says, in that tone he uses when he’s about to say something wise, “we all have parts of ourselves we struggle to understand. All you can do is try to embrace everything you are and trust that the people around you will try to do the same.”
It should be Shiro out there, piloting the black lion. He’s the one everyone really wants, but he needs time. He spent eighteen months trapped inside the black lion’s head and he needs time to remember who he is separate from her before he can even think about piloting her again. Keith gets it. It’s just, he’s not Shiro and he never will be.
“What makes you think I can do that,” he says.
“Because I’ve seen for myself what you can do when you put your mind to it,” Shiro says softly and Keith can hear the smile in his voice, “and because I love you. I love every bit of you. No matter what. There’s nothing that could ever change that.”
Keith smiles and listens to Shiro’s heartbeat, still strong despite everything he’s been through, or maybe because of it. It’s possible Keith doesn’t need to be Shiro to be the black paladin. Maybe it’s enough just to have his love.
“I love you too,” Keith says.
He will never stop meaning it.
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